Safety testing of autonomous vehicle development is a crucial part of the process. Hitting the road without ensuring everything will be in order, especially in public roads, can lead to situations the control system of the autonomous car is unprepared for and can result in cases where the safety driver should interfere, or even worse, an accident happens. Accordingly, several different approaches for safety testing is known from the prior art.
Based on the above reasons extensive testing has to be done. Thus, many approaches are known for simulation techniques which can help the development of the control unit of an autonomous car.
In US 2017/0132117 A1 a method and a device for generating test cases for autonomous vehicles are disclosed. The test case generation is based on a central database, the data of which are obtained from any kind of real vehicles of the traffic. The disadvantage of the approach of this document is that this kind of test case generation is considered to be suitable for developing a basic control unit; however, it is not considered to be suitable for handling unexpected cases. In US 2017/0132118 A1, in correspondence with the above document, a method and apparatus for testing software for autonomous vehicles are disclosed.
A hybrid simulation technique for simulating various situations is disclosed in Franck Gechter et al.: Towards a Hybrid Real/Virtual Simulation of Autonomous Vehicles for Critical Scenarios; SIMUL 2014, The Sixth International Conference on Advances in System Simulation.
A further article, Franck Gechter et al.: VIVUS: Virtual Intelligent Vehicle Urban Simulator: Application to Vehicle Platoon Evaluation, preprint submitted to Elsevier 2011 discloses a framework for building virtual reality. Disadvantageously, this simulator needs human interaction in many steps. Disclosures of other simulation frameworks can be found under the following links:                https://uk.mathworks.com/products/automated-driving/features.html        https://uk.mathworks.com/help/driving/examples/model-radar-sensor-detections.html        http://www.vcrashusa.com/        
A simulation framework is disclosed in DE 10 2007 053 501 A1. In this framework, a master scenario file is created from which a lot of similar scenarios are generated. Further simulation frameworks are disclosed in DE 10 2007 053 500 A1, DE 10 2008 027 526 B4, DE 10 2011 088 805 A1, US 2016/0210383 A1 and US 2017/0161414 A1.
In view of the known approaches, there is a demand for a method by the help of which the control unit of an autonomous car can be modified (developed further) in a more efficient way than the prior art approaches to enable it to respond, as well as possible, to unexpected situations.